Monday, August 15, 2016

(Interview given to a student of Religious Studies collecting material for her dissertation)

1. You have written that a Hindu simply
is an Indian pagan. This raises the question: what is a pagan, exactly? Or what
is paganism?

Strictly
a “rustic”, “peasant” or “village bumpkin”, as opposed to the Christians in the
Roman Empire, who were at first mostly city-dwellers. The textbook definition
since the 4th century is “a non-Christian”. After Islam became more familiar in
Europe, it often came to mean a non-Abrahamist, or better, anyone who does not
subscribe to prophetic monotheism. The category “Pagan” strictly includes both
atheists and polytheists, but mostly it is only used for a type of religious
people, excluding non-religious atheists and agnostics.

When the
Muslim invaders brought the Persian geographical term “Hindu” (“Indian”) into
India, it came to mean “Indian by birth and by religion”, excluding those who
were non-Indian or who were Indian but followed a non-Indian religion. In those
days, people remained conscious of their original nationality for very long.
When in the wake of the British, some Indian Zoroastrians settled in South
Africa, they called themselves “Persians” though their families had lived in
India for a thousand years. By the same token, the Syrian Christians counted as
Syrians; but even if they counted as Indians, they would still not be Hindus,
for they followed a non-Indian religion.

By
contrast, all Indians without foreign links are Hindus: Brahmins, upper castes,
middle castes, downtrodden, tribals, Buddhists (“clean-shaven Brahmins”
according to the 8th-century Muslim chronicle Chach-Nama), Jains. By implication
even sects that did not exist yet, were Hindu upon birth: Lingayats, Sikhs,
Arya Samaj, RK Mission, ISKCon. Today, “Hindu” is a dirty word, so they all try
to weasel out of it and declare themselves non-Hindu, also to enjoy the legal
benefits of being a minority. (Indeed, under the prevailing anti-secular
Constitution, non-Hindus are privileged above Hindus.) They see Hinduism as a
sinking ship, and being rats, they leave it. But I am not impressed by this. People
should simply grow up and face facts: they satisfy the definition of “Hindu”,
so they are Hindus, Indian Pagans. I don’t care what elephants think of being
called elephants; since they satisfy the definition of “elephant”, they are
elephants, period.

Since
roughly 1980, the RSS family of Hindu Nationalist organizations have tried to
water this clear historical definition down by saying that “Hindu” simply means
“Indian”. That would have been the pre-invasion usage, when Persian and Arabic
were not tainted by Islam yet. But when the word was brought into India, it
immediately differed from “Indian” by its religious dimension. Muslims and
Christians are by definition not Hindu. But because the contemporary Hindutva
leaders are not clear-headed (or not brave) enough to face difference, they try to
spirit the difference between Hinduism and Islam away by calling the Indian
Muslims “Mohammedi Hindus”. And likewise, “Christi Hindus”. I think that is the
summum of cowardice.

Look, I
don’t claim to be brave. I just sit behind my computer screen. Writing articles
that displease some people doesn’t require more courage than posting cheerful holiday
messages on Facebook; it’s just words. It is nothing compared to a soldier on
the battlefield running into enemy fire.Here in Flanders’ fields, we are presently commemorating every event
that punctuated WW1, a hundred years ago. When you read about those events, you
come across unspeakable acts of bravery. So, compared to that, scholarship is
nothing, even when a bit controversial. But conversely, when even words can
intimidate you, when even a purely logical application of the definition of
“Hindu” is too much, when even a word of disapproval by the secularists is too
much, that is really intolerable cowardice. To be sure, even the secularists
approve of a difference between “Hindu” and “Indian”, but the so-called
Hintutva people now try to out-secularize the secularists by even denying that
there is a separate religious category “Hindu”, different from the
secular-geographical term “Indian”. They have come a long way: from flattering
themselves as being the “vanguard of Hindu society” to denying that there is
even such a thing as a “Hindu Indian” different from a “non-Hindu Indian”.

2. You have criticized both
Christianity and Islam for being basically a set of superstitious beliefs. Yet
many would claim to the contrary that there is a lot more superstition in
Hinduism. For instance, while Christianity and Islam at least have a historical
basis to many of their most important stories, this is less the case for the
Hindu stories about various gods and goddesses, which are more akin to the
stories about Greek or Egyptian gods. Furthermore, the practice of image- or
idol-worship could itself be considered superstitious, since it leads the
worshipper to fetishize the idol as a source of magical powers, or as a divine
being in itself. What is your response to this?

The core
beliefs of Christianity and Islam are superstitious. Or without bringing in any
psychologizing jargon like “superstitious”, they are, more simply, untrue. It
is not true that Mohammed had a direct telephone line with God, and that the
Quran is simply a collection of divine messages. It is simply not true that
Jesus rose from the dead; just like all deceased people, he is not part of this
world anymore. Much less is it true that he thereby freed mankind from sin (and
thereby also of mortality, the punishment that befell Adam and Eve after their
Fall into sinfulness); levels of sinfuless or of human mortality have not
appreciably changed in 33 AD. Yes, it is claimed by believers as a historical
that Jesus resurrected or that Mohammed received revelations, but apart from
the fact that the date given is realistic, the event is definitely not. And I
don’t even go into the theories that Jesus or Mohammed never existed. Believing
something that is flatly untrue, and moreover as the basis of your worldview,
that is simply not the case with Hinduism.

As it
happens, Hinduism is not one definite worldview. It is not based on one untrue
statement, like Christianity or Islam. It is not necessarily based on a true
statement either. Within the Hindu big tent, there are many traditions with
their own doctrines. They have an awe for the sacred in common, but what counts
as sacred is conceived in many ways. As the Rg-Veda says: the wise ones call
the one reality by many names. Among these traditions, the Upanishadic ones
converge on an insight that is not historical but true, just as the Law of
Gravity is not historical (its date and place of discovery happen to be known
but are immaterial, as it is valid everywhere and forever). It is the Atmavad
or doctrine of the Self, summed up in Great Sayings like Aham Brahmasmi, I am
Brahma. That is the monist or Vedanta view, in parallel you have the dualist or
Sankhya view, still within the Hindu big tent, the basis of Patañjali’s yoga.
It is both rational and spiritual; Christianity and Islam cannot boast of
anything parallel. But I agree that this is only the spiritual backbone of
Hinduism, and that many of the beliefs and practices around it are not so
rational. However, these don’t have the status that the core beliefs of
Christianity c.q. Islam have. You can safely discard them and still be a Hindu.

3. You have questioned the conventional
view that Siddharta Gautama broke away from Hinduism and founded a new
religion. Yet did he not deny the authority of the Vedas? And did he not reject
the caste system, saying (variously quoted): “By birth one is not an outcaste, by
birth one is not a Brahmin; by deeds alone one is an outcaste, by deeds alone
one is a Brahmin”?

He did
not go out of his way to deny the Vedas, and if he did, it only followed the
latter part of the Veda itself. The Jnanakanda part (knowledge), the Upanishads,
is explicit in declaring the Karmakanda part (ritualism), the Brahmanas, as
outdated. Shankara lambasts the Sankhya-Yoga school for never quoting the Veda.
It was part (not the whole, but part) of Hinduism to ignore the Veda.

He did
not bother about the caste system, which Buddhists in Lanka and Tibet also
practised. Buddhism never changed the social system in China, Japan or
Thailand, because it had a spiritual agenda incompatible with a social reform
agenda. If pursuing your own desires is already incompatible with pursuing
Enlightenment, this counts even more for the immense job of structurally
changing society. Either you do that, or you become a monk practising the
spiritual path, but you cannot do both.

It simply accepted the social structures it
found. Check the Buddha’s own life. Once his friend Prasenajit discovered that
his queen was not a true Kshatriya, only on her father’s side, so he repudiated
her and their common son. The Buddha persuaded him to take them back, pleading
for the older conception of the caste system, which was purely in the paternal
line (same caste as father, mother’s caste can be any). Now, if he had been a
caste revolutionary, as all Indian schoolkids are taught nowadays, this
incident would have been the occasion par excellence to lambast and ridicule
the caste system. But he does no such thing, he upholds one version (the older
one, for far from being a revolutionary, he was a conservative) of the caste
system.

Or
consider the distribution of his ashes after his cremation. They are divided in
eight and given to eight cities for keeping them as a relic in a Stupa. The
ruling elites of those cities had staked their claim exclusively and purely in
casteist terms, though this was a Buddhist context par excellence. After 45
yeas of Buddhism, they say: “He was a Kshatriya, we are Kshatriyas, so we are
entitled to his ashes.” If Buddhism had been anti-casteist, then as bad pupils
they still might have thought in casteist terms, but they would have used a
non-casteist wording. Instead, they have no compunction at all in using
casteist terms.

I have
more examples, but to sum up: the Buddha was an elite figure par excellence, he
mainly recruited his novices among the elite, and all the later Buddhist
thinkers were Brahmins, as would be the Maitreya, the next Buddha. He was not
an egalitarian at all, witness his initial refusal to ordain women, and when he
relented on this, he ordered that even the seniormost nun would be subservient
to the juniormost monk. So, the secularist-cum-Ambedkarite attempt to
appropriate the Buddha for modern socialist causes is totally false. It is bad
history par excellence.

4. Regarding Islam, it seems that one
of your foremost critiques of this religion is the Qur’an itself, which you
view as (if I understand your position correctly) irredeemably fanatical and
intolerant. Yet as you are surely aware, the Qur’an is a complex work which
takes on different qualities depending on how the verses are interpreted, which
verses are emphasized, whether a verse is considered as universal or
contextual, and so on. Thus there are many Islamic scholars who claim, for
instance, that armed jihad is only permitted in self-defense, seeing that
militant verses are often accompanied by verses preaching restraint and
forgiveness. So does the Qur’an really have to be problematic in itself? Is it
not rather certain traditions (mostly Salafi) of interpreting the Qur’an which
are a problem?

Let me
clarify first that my fairly elaborate answers to your questions on Islam do
not mean that I am especially interested in Islam. The Salman Rushie and the
Ayodhya affairs forced me to study it more closely, but since the 1990s, I have
only returned to it when current affairs dragged me back to it. As a subject,
it has lost my interest because it is quite straightforward and all the
important answers have already been given. The only meaningful debate that
remains, is on which policy vis-à-vis Islam wil deliver both Muslims and
non-Muslims from it, as painlessly as possible.

Now,
your very common position that “source text good, tradition bad”, or “founder
good, followers bad”, or “prophet full of good intentions, followers
misunderstood him”. (It is equally used in the case of Christianity: “freeing
Christ from Churchianity”, and all that.) Only by not reading the Qur’an, and
especially the life events of the Prophet, can you say that. The magic wand of
“interpretation” does not impress me. What interpretation do you know of that
turns QaTaLa, “slaughter”, into “restraint and forgiveness”? Moreover, Muslims
and their sympathizers have had decades to “reinterpret” their scriptures, and
what is the result? The prophet’s biography (Sirat Rasul Allah), of which the
authoritative translation by Alfred Guillaume is very literal and has been
published in Karachi under Islamic supervision, is used by Muslims worldwide (their
Quranic Arabic is usually not that fluent either), unaltered. Thomas Cleary’s
islamophile “translation” of the Qur’an does not meaningfuly “reinterpret” the
Qur’an, but simply leaves out the embarrassing parts; similarly a Dutch
selective translation of the Sira that was recently published. The most-used
English translations of the Qur’an are by Muslims, yet they faithfully
translate that “war will reign between us until ye believe in Allah alone”.
There, we are fortunate that their great respect for the prophet’s every word
prevents them from imposing their own false interpretations instead of it.

Jihad
only permitted in self-defence? Pray, why did Mohammed order a (failed)
invasion of the Byzantine empire? Why did he attack the Meccan caravans, who
went about their business peacefully? When the Muslim army was defeated in
central France by Charles the Hammer in 731, what was it doing there, thousands
of miles from Arabia? Defending itself? These are just silly sop-stories. As an
intellectual spectacle, it is amusing to see the acrobatics of “enlightened” Islamophiles
in exculpation of Islam.

The
solution is simply to grow up. It is not so hard to outgrow childhood beliefs,
though it does take an intellectual and social transition, especially in the
intermediate period when you have to co-exist with relatives who still shy away
from taking this step. But then, I am asking no one to make changes in his life
and outlook that I haven’t been through myself. I had the exceptional good
fortune of being in the middle of a nation-wide (largely Europe-wide, in fact)
religious conversion. I was born in Catholic Flanders, a frontline of the Roman
Church against Anglican England, Calvinist Holland, Lutheran Germany and
secular-Masonic France. In the 1950s, society was still deeply penetrated by
the Church’s all-seeing eyes. Everyone in my primary school went to church on
Sundays, was baptized, had a Catholic Saint’s name, etc. In the 1960s, this
edifice started crumbling, with Vatican 2 as both cause and consequence. By the
1980s, this became the dominant narrative, and the conformists who had earlier
gone to church because everyone did, now stayed away because everyone did.
Today, practising Catholics are a small minority. The ex-Catholics are now the
dominant group, until the next generation takes over, because they are not even
“ex”, they simply have no memory of Catholicism. And all this without
bloodshed, without destruction of the admittedly wonderful artistic heritage of
the Church. (I still sing Gregorian plainchant underthe shower.)

So, that
is what I wish for my Muslim friends too. Make Islam un-cool. Outgrow it. And
take it from me: there is life after apostasy.

5. I would also like to ask the same
question regarding Muhammad ibn Abdullah, the prophet of Islam. There are many
hadiths attributed to Muhammad which certainly seem to us to set a bad example,
but there are also many hadiths to the contrary. Is it not again simply a
matter of emphasis and interpretation? For instance, consider this opinion by
the scholar Hamza Yusuf, who was traditionally educated in the Maliki madhab.
Do you consider his understanding of what Muhammad stood for as somehow
Islamically illegitimate? (pardon the flawed subtitles)

I have
toughed it out to listen through the Shaykh’s special pleading, but I really
knew enough after the first sentence, where he names Karen Armstrong as his
main inspiration. Hers is a rare extreme of special pleading, distorting
everything of Islamic history to fit modern values. The rest of his narrative
is the usual idealization of the person Mohammed, as in his very special
courtship with the widow Khadija (but with the false allegation that women
before Islam had no inheritance rights, just when Khadija’s case proves the
opposite). It is the basic conjuror's trick: directing the audience’s focus to a
few nice episodes in Mohammed’s life and keeping the rest out of view. That is
why Muslims are more properly called “Mohammedans”: they are far more punctual
followers of Mohammed than Christians are of Christ.

To be
sure, Mohammed may well have had some positive traits. He was known as very
reliable, and I have no quarrel with that. Whether Khadija chose him because of
those traits, as amply argued here, is another matter: he was a good young
toyboy for this mature lady, and like his poverty (he worked as a shepherd in
the service of the Meccan townspeople), his age made him her inferior and thus
less likely to claim lordship over the wealth she had inherited or augmented by
her entrepreneurial skills. But even i fit was a marriage made in heaven, wit
hall manner of perfections accruing to the bridegroom,that doesn’t make him
God’s spokesman. Shaykh may pontificate as much as he wants about Mohammed’s
claimed virtues, that still does not make him more than the next man. He was
neither the Son of God (as Muslims rightly hold against the Christians) nor a
prophet with a private telephone line with God (as Muslims believe; it is the
heart of their religion).

Let’s
cut short all the circumlocutions, let us cut out all the modern propaganda,
and look at what the primary sources say.We can summarize Mohammed’s life story in a single sentence: he destroyed an existing pluralistic society
(Polytheists, Sabians, Zoroastrians, Christians, Jews and Hanifs) and replaced
it with a monolithic Islamic dictatorship. That is what the Islamic source
texts themselves say. It is the height of ridiculousness that the
multiculturalists in Europe, like their “secularist” counterparts in India,
hobnob with Mohammed’s followers.

A lot
also becomes clear when we know that most Arabs shook off Islam after
Mohammed’s death and defeated the Muslim army. Unfortunately, they demobilized
after that, the Muslim army came back and this time they securely imposed
Islam. But the Arabs were the first victims of Islam. Mohamed practised
robbery, extortion, abduction for ransom, rape, enslavement, slave-trade, and
the murder of his critics and of a resistant Jewish tribe. All those data are
in the primary sources of Islam. There is no way that an Islamic court can
declare them un-Islamic,-- short of saying that “Mohammed was a bad Muslim”.

It
follows that I am skeptical of Muslims who call themselves “moderate”. First of
all, the distinction between moderate and extremist Muslims is an invention by
non-Muslim soft-brains, unknown in Islam, and firmly rejected both by
ex-Muslims and by leading Muslims such as Turkish president Erdoğan. He calls
it insulting to Islam to make such a distinction. At any rate, I will accept
Shaykh’s interpretation as moderate the day I hear him say: “Mohammed was
wrong. Don’t follow Mohammed.” If, by contrast, he still recommends following
Mohammed, as every Muslim is expected to do, he is in fact telling us: do
practise abduction, robbery, rape, slave-taking, beheading, stoning, for those
are all things he actually did, not just displaying his charms to win Khadija
in marriage, as you might think after hearing Shaykh's narrative. Until he takes
this distance from Mohammed’s precedent behaviour, he is just a wolf in sheep’s
clothing.

6. Finally, I haven been impressed by
many of your writings, which always allow the reader to follow transparently
your train of thought – more than can be said about much academic literature in
my opinion – and which offer some thought-provoking conclusions on diverse subjects.
I am not always in agreement with your viewpoints (and sometimes I simply don’t
know), but all the same your method strikes me as a very refreshing example of
how the history of religions can actually be studied. This is all the more
interesting since you are, if I understand correctly, unaffiliated with any
university and basically carrying out your research on your own. So my final
question is: What advice would you give to someone who wants to pursue the same
path? What type of literature would you recommend; how does one work with the
primary sources; how many languages does one need to master? (How many
languages do you know yourself?)

To start at the end: I have studied mother tongue Dutch,
other Belgian national languages French and German, and English; these I read
and speak fluently. Afrikaans is really simplified Dutch, so I can also follow
it effortlessly. Because of my studies, I can get around in Mandarin and Hindi,
but claim no fluency. Persian I have largely forgotten. I also know a smattering
of Spanish, and in my young days, I also browsed through the Teach Yourself books of the Celtic,
Scandinavian, the main Uralic languages (Finnish, Hungarian), Serbo-Croatian and
Turkish. I totally forgot about those, though I can still decipher written
Scandinavian because of the closeness to my mother tongue, Dutch. But knowing
something of the structure of the languages has proved useful in comparative
linguistics and studies of the Indo-European language family.Among classical languages, my Latin was
always good, my study of Wenyan (classical Chinese) and Sanskrit was thorough
but I claim no fluency, alas no time to go deeply into them lately. I also
studied Greek for two years, some Biblical Hebrew, and a smattering of Quranic Arabic,
Sumerian and Sangam Tamil. The net result is that I know plenty of political
and philosophical terminology and can place the concepts in their proper
contexts, but I rarely use those languages as language. Thus, when I need to
look something up in the Vedas or the Mahabharata, I scroll through the English
text, and only when I come to the passage I was looking for, I switch to
reading the original. Life is short, and languages only interest me as entry to
a world of thought. I am a historian and more and more a philosopher; philology
has been a good basis but only as an instrument.

For born Indians, it ought to be a feasible minimum to familiarize
yourself with Sanskrit. For doing Indian history or philosophy, it is simply necessary.
For medieval history, you need to know Persian, and Arabic is a plus. In the
US, they did a test: of two equally-gifted groups of pupils, one took 8 hours of
English, and one 4 hours of English and 4 hours of Latin. After a few years,
the second group not only knew Latin, unlike the other group, but also had a
better knowledge of English. Similarly, your knowledge of your Indian mother
tongue will increase if you take out time to study the supposedly useless Sanskrit.
It also promotes national unity, the convergence between the vernaculars, and
also the phasing out of English, which you and me may find practical, but which
to Indians is an anti-democratic imposition by the Nehruvian elite.

Whenever possible, you should go back to the primary
sources. Thus, I am presently working on the history of early Buddhism, and I
was initially surprised by the world of difference between the usual narrative
peddled nowadays in schoolbooks and popular introductions, and the narrative
revealed by the primary sources. Apart from the many errors that have crept
into the modern narrative (mostly showing a strong anti-Hindu bias; see e.g.
what I told you above about caste), the over-all conceptual mistake is the
cardinal sin in history: the projection of modern concerns onto ancient
developments. History is all about difference, the fact that “the past is a
foreign country: they do things differently there”.

My being outside academe was not a matter of choice, but of
being boycotted. Thus, my very first Indological conference was the
International Ramayana Conference 1990 at my own university, Leuven, and I
defended the existence of a Hindu temple forcibly replaced by Babar’s mosque.
One-third of the professors there were privately in support but publicly
silent; one-third were furious at my daring to violate their safe space of
rationality with such a silly and politically tainted claim; and the last
one-third just didn’t have an opinion but were embarrassed at the commotion.
The following years, I was boycotted and bad-mouthed throughout academe. But
the fact is: I was right all along, as recent excavations and a court verdict
have confirmed, and all those big-time professors were wrong.

The good thing about being on my own is that I don’t feel
pressured to conform to the received wisdom. Thus, on Buddhism, practically all
academics concerned swear by the paradigm “Hinduism bad, Buddhism good”. If I
had been part of their circuit, I would probably have conformed to some extent
to their view, at least to accept the narrative of “Hinduism and Buddhism”, as
if these were two distinct entities on the same footing. Today I can just
ignore their fairy-tale and state: the Buddha was 100% a Hindu.

I don’t advise anyone to take the path I stumbled upon. But
if somehow it happens, at least you should enjoy its good side. Meanwhile, I
keep hoping against hope that the present supposedly Hindu gevernment will come
to its senses and invest in scholarship, rather than parroting the narratives
that several generations of secularist control over culture and education have established.
In that endeavour, they will not only have to deconstruct all the harm done by
the Nehruvians, but also the hare-brained alternatives presented by
traditionalist Hindu “history-rewriters”, who think history means quoting from
the Puranas. The last half-century, a gap in Hindu scholarship has grown that
will require energetic initiatives to fill.

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.